LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.03 (02) [E]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 03.AUG.2005 (02) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West) Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Rudi Vari <rudi at it.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (03) [E]
    From: Jan Strunk <strunkjan at hotmail.com>
    Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.07.28 (07) [E]

    Hello,

    just some stories about speaking "pure" High German. I frankly can't 
stand
    hearing "people in Hannover speak the purest High German" anymore....

Hallo everybody

It may well be that the people of Hannover do not speak "pure" German. 
However, I do recall that during my first visit to Germany, during the late 
1970's, that the German spoken by the Hannoverians was easier for me to 
understand than the German of the Müncheners. Perhaps this was because of 
the sing-song way of speaking in München, or because my ears were better 
atuned to the more clipped way of speaking in the north. Or yet perhaps it 
was that my knowledge of German, acquired in high school during the late 
1950's, was too limited to interpret the Münchener accent. At that stage I 
was also told the myth that the purest German was to be heard in Hannover, 
and perhaps that also helped to form my prejudice.

Whichever is the truth, over the years, I have come to actually enjoy 
hearing and better understanding German of the Southern persuasion.

Kind regards
Rudi Vari

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From: David Winterburn <david.winterburn at steinmuller.co.za>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (03) [E]

Hi Lowlanders

Ron wrote

>I am not surprised those people had no idea about Low Saxon ("Platt").
>Assumedly, they were younger people from large cities.  I further assume
>that they were of an age group that was raised by the post-war generation
>or, if they were older, by people that grew up during World War II.  The
>post-war era until about 1980 is by many considered the "dark age" for Low
>Saxon in Germany, particularly in larger cities.

I work with some Germans one of whom is my friend. His home language is 
Swabian. What surprised me was that he said that when he goes home on 
holiday (to some place close to Stuttgart) his English suffers a bit ( that 
didn't surprise me). I said I suppose your German( Standard) improves; no he 
said there was no effect on that at all because he only speaks Swabian at 
home. When he communicates with his family by email he usually does that in 
German. In his opinion a standard German speaker can only understand about 
30% of the dialogue of a person speaking Swabian.

He also told me that Germans from the North ie the Platt area, start 
speaking Afrikaans after only about 4 months of arriving in South Africa 
just by keeping their ears open.(The Dutch even sooner though they never 
lose their strong guttural accent)

My Austrian hairdresser told me she went to Namibia on holiday once and 
filled her car up way out in the desert somewhere. The petrol attendant (I 
think he was a baster)walked up to her and starting speaking her native 
dialect.( Something close to Bavarian)

Dave Winterburn

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From: Ingmar Roerdinkholder <ingmar.roerdinkholder at WORLDONLINE.NL>
Subject: LL-L "Idiomatica" 2005.08.02 (05) [E]

Didi, very interesting you bring this up.
This <ä> for Dutch short <a> is typically for Antwerp, isn't it?
I notice it in the Antwerpian accent - also when people speak Dutch
instead of Brabantian- all the time.

There is a kind of schedule to be made in the way vowels in the Antwerp
prono of Dutch differs from the Standard:

SD  - A
[a] - [ä]      kat    [kat] - [kät]
[E] - [I]      bed    [bEt] - [bIt]
[I] - [i]      kind   [kInt]- [kint]
[Y] - [y]      rug    [rYx] - [ryC]
[i] - [i:]     wieg   [v\ix]- [wi:C]
[u] - [u:]     voet   [f\ut]- [vu:t]

Or, want I am beginning to believe more and more lately:

Standard Dutch (SD) has actually <kind> =[kent] and <rug> =[r2x] instead of
[kInt] and [rYx]. That would explain the difference we hear between German
short i and ü, Dutchies hear German Kind = "kient" [kint], and Rück
= "ruuk" [ryk], not as [kInt] and [rYk], and "kient" and "ruuk" are even
written like that in "Dutch spelling" in German language guides for
travellers.

I think SAMPA has [}] or [{] for this, I'm sure Ron knows the right one.

Ingmar

Diederik Masure:
>The only one I knew/use myself is "aai is mè z' gat in de bouter gevalle",
>[a.i is mE s@ gæt in de bOt at r g at væl@] but my SAMPA sucks and I don't know
>its representative for the æ-sound from English...

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From: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (03) [E]

> I am not surprised those people had no idea about Low Saxon ("Platt").
> Assumedly, they were younger people from large cities.  I further assume
> that they were of an age group that was raised by the post-war generation
> or, if they were older, by people that grew up during World War II.  The
> post-war era until about 1980 is by many considered the "dark age" for Low
> Saxon in Germany, particularly in larger cities.  Use of the language was
> discouraged at least indirectly, at least by neglect and exclusion.  The
> general message was that it was not good for young people, that it would
> hamper their education and professional success, that dealing with it as a
> hobby was all right but was really a waste of time.  I know quite a lot of
> North German city folks whose parents were native Low Saxon speakers but 
> did
> not pass on the language to them, mostly for that reason.  Sadly, this
> includes people who really loved the language.  They had come to be 
> resigned
> to the prospect of the language dying with them, and most of them did not
> think it was right to "harm" their children with it and make them social
> oddballs.

Unfortunately, this is the fate of many languages around the world.
People don't generally understand the fact that bilingualism enhances
the intellect of a child in most cases, rather than confusing them or
making them use their second language poorly. If only everybody knew
the truth, language death would surely slow down quite a bit.

> Yesterday I watched a snippet of the Korean evening news, a report about
> Korean-Japanese young people spending a few weeks in Korea to reenforce
> their cultural roots.  When they were interviewed they all spoke Japanese.
> They had little or no Korean.  Again, Korean language, giving away your
> ethnicity, can be a stigma in Japan in that it may provoke discrimination,
> and many Korean-Japanese parents are led to believe that not teaching 
> Korean
> (at least not really) would give their children a brighter future.

But aren't most Japanese from the Nara area, and others with "Yamato"
ancestry, Korean-Japanese? After all, descendants of Baekje are
considered Koreans, aren't they? ;)

> Isn't it similar also in the case of young people of Ainu ancestry,
> especially those that live in cities like Aomori, Morioka, Akita, Sendai,
> Monbetsu, Enbetsu, Nakagawa, Wakanai or Sopporo, who don't know the Ainu
> language and know hardly anything about their ancestral culture even 
> though
> their parents or grandparents are linguistically and culturally Ainu by
> upbringing?

Yes, it really is, unfortunately. In many cases, people's parents have
not even told them of their Ainu ancestry, and they go through much of
their life thinking they're just like any other Japanese, perhaps
until they are discriminated against for being "hairy Ainu", which
they will initially claim not to be unless perhaps they look into it
more, which they very well may not.

Unlike Ainu people, most people of Ryukyuan heritage have family names
that makes their origin fairly obvious, for example "Shimabukuro",
"Ishimine", "Shima", "Ikema", "Amuro", and truckloads of other
peculiar family names which are outside what is considered "normally"
Japanese (ie, a two-character family name, with both characters coming
from a list of perhaps 200, for example I-noue, Kawa-moto, Mori-naga,
Yama-shita, Ko-bayashi, Ta-naka...), some of which are telltale
Ryukyuan ("Shimabukuro" is never to be found in people of pure
mainland heritage, for example).

Mark

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From: Karl-Heinz Lorenz <Karl-Heinz.Lorenz at gmx.net>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (08) [E]

Hi Marsha!

I tried to find some spoken samples of Alsatian in the net. The only I've
found is this: http://www.dialekt.ch/mp3/nordwest/Bollag_Grussenheim.htm

I don't think there is much yiddish in it, for me it sounds simply Alsatian.
The sample is about the life of the Jews in Upper-Alsace. See also:
http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/grussenheim_cimetiere.htm

Eifach losna (=listen in Alemmanic)

Karl-Heinz

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From: Críostóir Ó Ciardha <paada_please at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (03) [E]


Ron wrote:
"Isn't it similar also in the case of young people of Ainu ancestry, 
especially those that live in cities like Aomori, Morioka, Akita, Sendai, 
Monbetsu, Enbetsu, Nakagawa, Wakanai or Sopporo, who don't know the Ainu 
language and know hardly anything about their ancestral culture even though 
their parents or grandparents are linguistically and culturally Ainu by
upbringing?"

This is, of course, also the case with indigenous Australians, and Mâori. 
Because demographic discourses in Australia (certainly) and New Zealand (to 
some extent) are primarily "racial" with only secondary references to 
culture and language, many indigenous Australians have no knowledge of, or 
interest in, their ethnic languages, and language loss between generations 
is still common and of no great controversy to those involved. To put it 
another way, indigenous Australians look to the African-American experience 
for a model, rather than to those of the Welsh or French-Canadian.

I would add that this is also the case in Ireland, where language has 
retreated as an ethnic marker to the (in my eyes, ludicrous) extent that 
accent is considered much more important in defining Irishness. For example, 
if you have an Irish passport, an Irish name, and can speak Irish, you 
simply will still not be seen as Irish if you do not have an Irish accent.

Go raibh maith agat,

Criostóir.

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From: Mark Williamson <node.ue at gmail.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2005.08.02 (08) [E]

Ahh, but Ron, consider that for the Alsatian speaker in Brazil or
Australia, the time IS right! ;)

Mark

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

Mark, you wrote above:

> Unfortunately, this is the fate of many languages around the world.
> People don't generally understand the fact that bilingualism enhances
> the intellect of a child in most cases, rather than confusing them or
> making them use their second language poorly. If only everybody knew
> the truth, language death would surely slow down quite a bit.

Of course!  But this is easier said than done.  We are talking about extreme 
situations in which parents want to put an end to the "bad" language that 
they have come see as a hallmark of their "inferior" class or ethnic group. 
They want better for their children than what they had experienced, want to 
dissociate their children from all that "backward" stuff and open up new 
doors for them.

Remember that it was only a few decades ago that Indigenous American and 
Australian children were taken away from their families and put into 
institutions to "better" them, and this included practically beating their 
native languages out of them.  Nor was it all that long ago that Afrikaans-, 
Scots and Low-Saxon-speaking children were beaten, shamed or otherwise 
punished for speaking their native languages at school.  Even though this is 
over now, the stigma cannot be wiped away in a single generation.

Many of those parents would even agree with the usefulness of bilingualism, 
but they don't want their own low-prestige languages to be involved.

I remember that when I was growing up many people said that it would be more 
useful if children learned "real" languages besides German, such as English 
and French, that Low Saxon would be a useless burden and would make children 
targets of ridicule and discrimination.  I remember a controversy in 
Greenland in the 1960s and 1970s, where, in great part instituted by 
Danish-speaking educators, more Kalaallisut (Greenlandic Inuktitut) language 
content was to be introduced in school curricula.  Native speaker parents 
objected, claiming their children would be better off with stronger Danish, 
which would be required for superior jobs and study opportunities in 
Denmark.  (Happily, the image of Kalaallisut has improved with increased 
Greenlandic independence, but a Greenlandic acquaintance complains that even 
now many people switch to Danish if a "Dane" enters the scene, who may be a 
born and raised Greenlander of pure Danish descent and is likely to be 
proficient in Kalaallisut.)

So, if the power elite suddenly "sees the light" and introduces progressive 
measures, it may be too late, because the inferiority complex cultivated for 
generations has become too firmly rooted and has resulted in a form of 
self-loathing.  You can see this sort of thing all over the world, and in my 
opinion it is this that really stands in the way of language preservation.

Hi, Karl-Heinz!  Thanks for the link.  I don't hear anything Yiddish in that 
sample either.  Rumors about preserved "Western Yiddish" in Alsace and 
adjacent parts of Switzerland keep flying around, but so far I have seen and 
heard no substantiation of that.  At best, those are local Alemannic 
dialects with a bit of Jewish "jargon" thrown in, probably Western Yiddish 
remnants, perhaps substrates.  I would expect Western Yiddish to be quite 
different, judging by the way the language was about two centuries ago.  And 
then there is the persistent myth that "Western Yiddish" is still spoken in 
the Netherlands and Belgium.  Those dialects are imported Eastern Yiddish 
dialects with Dutch, Flemish and Brabantish influences.  All this contrasts 
with the assumption of most Yiddishists that real Western Yiddish is now 
extinct.

Hi, Críostóir!  You wrote above:

> To put it another way, indigenous Australians look to the African-American
> experience for a model, rather than to those of the Welsh or 
> French-Canadian.

If this is true it must be a new development.  I have never seen any sign of 
it.  I remember that in the 1960s and 1970s African-American-led attempts to 
establish a Black Power base and movement among indigenous Australian ended 
in failure, appealed only to a handful of angry young men.  While, at least 
at that time, American country music and many other things American were 
very popular in Aboriginal Australia, the indigenous population as a whole 
could not relate to the concept of universal "blackness" and to the 
perceptively aggressive tone of the American campaign and awareness 
movement.  Besides, the Black American experience is very different, forced 
immigration and enslavement being key.  Indigenous Australians have far more 
in common with Indigenous Americans, and it seems that these two general 
groups have had more fruitful exchanges since then.

Mark (above) about my unseasonal choice of song:

> Ahh, but Ron, consider that for the Alsatian speaker in Brazil or
> Australia, the time IS right! ;)

That would imply acceptance that summer up over is pretty much over, and I 
will have none of that.  No, sirry!

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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